Parking zones expanding in August

Commuters to Prague will find that the number of free parking areas will soon be reduced and new pay-as-you-go zones will take their place in three city districts.

Prague 5, 6 and 8 will expand the scope of their paid parking zones on the last weekend of August. The areas are not extensive, though.

Those districts have become overrun with cars parked by commuters from the suburbs seeking to avoid paid parking in the city center.

The owners of more than one car or entrepreneurs residing in areas with paid parking zones will see some improvement. People will pay Kč 7,000 a year for a second car. Entrepreneurs and companies that do business in those districts will also be able to get permits, at Kč 7,000 for one car.

A new mobile application will allow people to pay parking fees. Zaparkuju.cz can be downloaded to a mobile phone and then registered (iPhone / Android). The driver can enter the car's registration tag into the application and select the parking time. He or she pays online via a credit card.

Parking rules are determined by each district. Prague Deputy Mayor Petr Dolínek previously said that the parking zones need to make sense from a perspective of transport for the entire city and that they also have to reflect a consensus of the city district.

The whole city should come under one parking plan sometime in 2018, and pricing policies and monitoring systems can become more coordinated, Dolínek said.

Zones in Prague began to operate in 1996 in parts of Prague 1 and were subsequently extended to the whole of Prague 1, 2, 7, and most of Prague 3. The zones were extended to Prague 5, 6 and 8 in 2016.

Zones are also run by the Town Hall in Prague 13, 16 and 22. There are three types of zones, one allows parking for residents of the district, and the others allow parking for short and long periods of time.